Film Freak Centraltag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-999282957331064452014-10-12T19:53:38-05:00TypePadLars and the Real Girl (2007); The Passion of Greg the Bunny: The Best of the Film Parodies Volume 2 (2006-2007); The Cottage (2008) [Unrated] - DVDstag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01b8d07c260a970c2014-10-12T19:53:38-05:002014-10-13T11:27:41-05:00LARS AND THE REAL GIRL *½/**** Image A Sound B Extras D starring Ryan Gosling, Emily Mortimer, Paul Schneider, Kelli Garner screenplay by Nancy Oliver directed by Craig Gillespie THE PASSION OF GREG THE BUNNY: THE BEST OF THE FILM PARODIES VOLUME 2 Image B+ Sound B Extras C+ "Fur on the Asphalt," "Wumpus the Monster," "Sockville," "Blue Velveteen," "Plush: Behind the Seams," "Wacky Wednesday," "The Passion of the Easter Bunny: A Fabricated American Movie" THE COTTAGE ½*/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras D starring Andy Serkis, Reece Shearsmith, Stephen O'Donnell, Jennifer Ellison written and directed by Paul Andrew Williams by Ian Pugh Beyond its pale stab at indie street cred and an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay (which are almost one and the same these days), Lars and the Real Girl shares with Juno an invitation to partake in a never-ending stream of laughs over its premise until it basically flips a switch and instructs you to get emotional over it--the supposed target of discussion here being nothing less than that ever-popular subject of paternalistic revulsion, mental illness. Ryan Gosling turns his "twitchy zombie" knob up to eleven as Lars, a quiet loner living in his brother Gus's...Bill ChambersHerzog: The Collection [Blu-ray Disc] - Heart of Glass (1976)tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01a511f8d471970c2014-08-19T21:01:38-05:002014-08-19T21:01:38-05:00click any image to enlarge Herz aus Glas ***½/**** DVD - Image A Sound B Commentary B BD - Image A- Sound A- Commentary B starring Josef Bierbichler, Stefan Güttler, Clemens Scheitz, Volker Prechtel written and directed by Werner Herzog by Walter Chaw Hias (Josef Bierbichler) is a shepherd and a prophet, and his pronouncements pepper Heart of Glass like edicts from God. He defines the structure, in so much as there is one, of a picture that drifts in tone between Werner Herzog's nightmarish, nostalgic Bavarian romanticism and a certain variety of gothic surrealism. Indeed, Heart of Glass, while hewing close to Herzog's themes of the insufficiency of myth as a means to obscure truths about horror and beauty as well as of the artist as solitary, Byronic voyager, appears to be Herzog's play at the stylization of Buñuel. After an aged glassblower dies in a small village, the out-of-time surviving villagers, reliant on the "ruby glass" that was the artisan's specialty, spend the balance of the piece spiralling in a maddening gyre to divine the secret of the formula. Like Aguirre: The Wrath of God, the story behind the scenes--that Herzog hypnotized his cast daily to create a...Bill ChambersHerzog: The Collection [Blu-ray Disc] - My Best Fiend (1999)tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01a511f41906970c2014-08-11T10:15:52-05:002014-08-11T10:15:52-05:00Mein liebster Feind - Klaus Kinski **/**** DVD - Image B+ Sound B+ BD - Image B+ Sound B+ directed by Werner Herzog by Walter Chaw My Best Fiend is Werner Herzog trying to dispel some of the myths surrounding his career by magnifying a few of the myths surrounding Klaus Kinski's. As such, it feels a lot more like a cheap shot than like a tribute, burying as it does Kinski's indisputable genius beneath a lot of documentary evidence that Kinski was a slavering lunatic. And though Herzog betrays a definite affection for Kinski (nowhere more so than in a hilarious/warm reminiscence offered to the very proper German couple living in the apartment once shared by the director and actor), more often the piece is given to obfuscating outtakes and anecdotes. Consider the eclipsing impact that B-roll footage of a raving Kinski on the set of Aguirre, The Wrath of God and Herzog's comments about the natives offering to kill the actor for him have on Kinski's astonishingly reserved, haunted performance in the film. If you've never seen Aguirre, you'd think that Kinski was awful in it--and if you have seen Aguirre, your mind begins to blur what's actually...Bill ChambersHerzog: The Collection [Blu-ray Disc] - Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972)tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01a511eef41c970c2014-08-05T18:30:00-05:002014-08-11T10:20:33-05:00click any image to enlarge Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes ****/**** DVD - Image A Sound B+ Commentary A BD - Image A- Sound B+ Commentaries A starring Klaus Kinski, Helena Rojo, Del Negro, Ruy Guerra written and directed by Werner Herzog by Walter Chaw A work of holy madness about acts of holy madness, Aguirre, The Wrath of God is a transcendent, haunting film that defies description and captures, somehow, what it means to be human in all the venal, small, sometimes grand things that being human implies. Once seen, it's never forgotten, and upon repeat viewings, it's one of those pictures that makes you want to cry for no particular reason but that it is, in almost every non-quantifiable way, perfect, a film alight with invention, love, and passion--a memoir of the worm in the gut that demands blood and glory. Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) is an under-lieutenant in the bona fide Peruvian expedition of Gonzalo Pizarro (Alejandro Repullés) to find the lost city of gold, El Dorado, a fiction of the Peruvian Indians meant as a suicide pill for their conquistadors. Once the expedition bogs down in the mud of the rainy season, Pizarro sends nobleman Don Pedro de...Bill ChambersHerzog: The Collection [Blu-ray Disc] - Even Dwarfs Started Small (1971)tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01a511e54c46970c2014-07-29T00:17:42-05:002014-07-29T00:24:35-05:00click any image to enlarge Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen ***½/**** DVD - Image A Sound B+ Commentary A BD - Image A- Sound B+ Commentary A starring Helmut Döring, Gerd Gickel, Paul Glauer, Erna Gschwendtner written and directed by Werner Herzog by Walter Chaw Even Dwarfs Started Small opens with a disquieting montage featuring a young girl rending live birds with her teeth that also culminates in the image of a chicken eating another chicken (shades of Magritte's 1927 painting "Pleasure"). Both actions speak to a sort of insensate savagery, the divorce between the Freudian Id and Ego so favoured by the surrealists--and in setting the film in a fictitious place populated entirely by the little people of the title, it touches on the surrealist belief that non-Western civilizations were closer to an undifferentiated nature. The story proper concerns the uprising of a "Prisoner"-like colony against an ineffectual, Kafkaesque godhead (Pepi Hermine) and the Institution he represents. Rebelling against the imprisonment of leader Pepe (Gerd Gickel, tied to a chair throughout), the rebels devolve from a semi-organized protest into bedlam, crucifying monkeys, organizing cockfights, and, in one of the most hopeless conclusions in film, watching as rebel leader Hombre...Bill ChambersThe Slumber Party Massacre Collection - DVD|The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) - Blu-ray Disctag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c017ee3c89f04970d2014-04-15T15:49:03-05:002014-04-15T18:35:19-05:00THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE (1982) **½/**** DVD - Image C+ Sound C- Extras C+ BD - Image A- Sound B Extras C+ starring Michelle Michaels, Robin Stille, Michael Villella, Debra Deliso screenplay by Rita Mae Brown directed by Amy Jones SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE II (1987) **½/**** Image C+ Sound C Extras A- starring Crystal Bernard, Patrick Lowe, Kimberly McArthur, Atanas Ilitch written and directed by Deborah Brock SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE III (1990) */**** Image C Sound C Extras A- starring Keely Christian, Britain Frye, M.K. Harris, David Greenlee screenplay by Catherine Cyran directed by Sally Mattison by Alex Jackson 1982's The Slumber Party Massacre isn't a film so much as a work of film criticism. It was produced and directed by Amy Holden Jones, perhaps better known today as the screenwriter of Mystic Pizza and Indecent Proposal, and written by established Lesbian Feminist poet and author Rita Mae Brown, who is perhaps best known for the 1973 book Rubyfruit Jungle, typically considered one the earliest coming-of-age lesbian novels. RUNNING TIME 77 minutes MPAA R ASPECT RATIO(S) 1.78:1 (1080p/MPEG-4) LANGUAGES English 2.0 DTS-HD MA (Mono) SUBTITLES English REGION A DISC TYPE BD-50 STUDIO Scream Factory THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE RUNNING TIME...Bill ChambersElectra Glide in Blue (1973) - Blu-ray Disctag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c019b04d02b16970d2014-01-26T20:39:10-05:002014-01-26T22:01:14-05:00***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A starring Robert Blake, Billy (Green) Bush, Jeannine Riley, Elisha Cook screenplay by Robert Boris directed by James William Guercio by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. By 1973 in the United States, film had already become chronicles of listless motion, failed ideologies, ironic Westward expansion, and rampant paranoia. American cinema was in the process of cannibalizing itself in great gulps of genre reconsideration, taking the lead of the movies-by-critics of the French New Wave and reassessing the western/film noir/thriller cycle of studio-era Hollywood through a new mirror darkly: The iconography of the hero mythology Americans hold most dear (cowboy, hardboiled detective, two-fisted man of action), forced now to be populated by incoherent psychopaths and, worse, effeminate ones--lawyers, journalists, ex-cons, ex-soldiers back from an unpopular war, unloved, disrespected, lost and still losing. RUNNING TIME 113 minutes MPAA PG ASPECT RATIO(S) 2.35:1 (1080p/MPEG-4) LANGUAGES English 2.0 DTS-HD MA (Mono) SUBTITLES None REGION A DISC TYPE BD-50 STUDIO Shout! 1973 saw films like The Exorcist, The Wicker Man (from across the pond), The Last Detail, High Plains Drifter, Serpico, Sisters, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. Like Scorsese's Mean Streets and Malick's Badlands and Roeg's Don't...Bill ChambersMessage from Space (1978) - DVDtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01a3fc440128970b2014-01-15T20:41:17-05:002014-01-15T21:15:32-05:00***/**** Image C+ Sound C- Extras C Madness A starring Vic Morrow, Sonny Chiba, Philip Casnoff, Peggy Lee Brennan screenplay by Hiroo Matsuda directed by Kinji Fukasaku by Walter Chaw Essentially a big-budget, feature-film version of Calvinball if Bill Watterson were a manga artist undergoing a psychotic break, Kinji Fukasaku's balls-insane Message from Space is a very special brand of genius. It honours no structural logic that I can discern, though it does have a kinetic kid-logic, the kind honed from endless summer afternoons tromping around with your buddies, making shit up and being happier than you'll ever be again in your life. Message from Space captures that headiness, that heedlessness, the sort of reckless creativity that charts the course between memorable films by someone like Ed Wood and forgettable films by every other hack with the same level of talent but not the same joyful dedication. I'm not saying Message from Space is a good movie--I can't even say that the reasons for its existence are particularly honourable (it's an obvious Star Wars cash-grab). But I can say that Message from Space is crazy-energetic and has more delightful moments packed into it than a dozen "normal" movies. I also...Bill ChambersSwamp Thing: The Series (1990-1991) - DVDtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01a5108adf4d970c2014-01-08T00:01:00-05:002014-01-07T21:51:09-05:00Image B- Sound B Extras C "The Emerald Heart," "Falco," "Treasure," "From Beyond the Grave," "Blood Wind," "Grotesquery," "New Acqaintance," "Natural Enemy," "Spirit of the Swamp," "Legend of the Swamp Maiden," "The Death of Dr. Arcane," "The Living Image," "The Shipment," "Birthmarks," "The Dark Side of the Mirror," "Silent Screams," "Walk a Mile in My Shoots," "The Watchers," "The Hunt," "Touch of Death," "Tremors of the Heart," "The Prometheus Parabola" by Ian Pugh In many ways the anti-Darkman, Wes Craven's Swamp Thing also saw a comic-book scientist irrevocably transformed into a monster at the hands of hoodlum saboteurs. Alas, unlike Sam Raimi with his masterpiece, Craven is unable to strike a balance between seriousness and silliness, falling too far in the latter direction before the picture finally collapses under its own snarky weight. It is, however, the film that enlightened me as to why B-movie anti-appreciation is such a worthless endeavour, since Swamp Thing never bothers to pretend that it's anything more than a couple of dudes in rubber suits wailing on each other. When you're making a movie in the "MST3K" mindset, as Craven appears to be, you don't really have a movie in mind, per se--you're just positioning...Bill ChambersMystery Science Theater 3000 XVII - DVDtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c019b0051bb9f970d2013-10-25T20:34:26-05:002013-10-25T20:35:35-05:00Image C+ Sound C+ Extras B- 2.1 "The Crawling Eye" (1989), 5.15 "The Beatniks" (1992), 10.10 "The Final Sacrifice" (1998), 11.5 "Blood Waters of Dr. Z" (1999) by Alex Jackson I know it's loony, but I watched "Mystery Science Theater 3000" (or "MST3K") mostly for the movies. Oh, I liked the jokes. There were some episodes I laughed so hard at I had to turn off the television because I couldn't breathe. But I saw the riffing as a bonus, a way to make a good thing better. I didn't really watch the show just because it was funny, and its ironic appreciation of "bad movies" didn't strike me as all that different from the sincere appreciation I had for the likes of Plan 9 from Outer Space as a child. In fact, I don't think it's all that different from the deeper appreciation I have for those movies today. Mocking them doesn't necessarily detract from them. Their sensually visceral aspect always shines through. You can easily tell if something is any good regardless of who is talking over it. Besides, there's something amiably homey and relaxed about the "Mystery Science Theater 3000" approach. If you like a film, you...Bill ChambersQ: The Winged Serpent (1982) - Blu-ray Disctag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c0192acc5513c970d2013-08-26T20:08:22-05:002013-08-26T21:05:47-05:00Q ***/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras C starring Michael Moriarty, Candy Clark, David Carradine, Richard Roundtree written and directed by Larry Cohen click any image to enlarge by Bryant Frazer Writer-director Larry Cohen makes exploitation look easy. His iconic Black Caesar was basically a remake of Little Caesar with a black cast; his mutant-baby flick It's Alive amplified the generational rift created in families by the social revolutions of the 1960s and early-1970s to horror-movie proportions. Cohen is so commercially savvy that his screenwriting career has continued, in earnest, into the 21st century, placing projects like Phone Booth, Cellular, and Captivity at the Venn-diagram intersection between high-concept appeal and low-budget execution. He also has an instinct for character, and it never served him better than it did in Q, which is the story of a little criminal in a big city as much as it's the story of a huge feathered serpent lording over Manhattan. Q was set up quickly (in two days, to hear Cohen tell it), after Cohen was fired from an adaptation of Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury, and it features a terrific cast (Michael Moriarty, David Carradine, and Richard Roundtree) improvising many of the scenes...Bill ChambersRolling Thunder (1977) - Blu-ray Disctag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c019104231e3f970c2013-07-08T20:26:04-05:002013-07-08T21:22:26-05:00***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B+ starring William Devane, Tommy Lee Jones, Linda Haynes, James Best screenplay by Paul Schrader and Heywood Gould directed by John Flynn click any image to enlarge by Bryant Frazer Rolling Thunder's reputation was burnished considerably in the 1990s when Quentin Tarantino declared it one of his favourite films. It's a good call; Tarantino owes his career to his long-standing love affair with the grindhouse, and Rolling Thunder is in many ways the quintessence of Hollywood exploitation. Director John Flynn, who made a name for himself with his 1973 adaptation of a Donald E. Westlake novel, The Outift, comes across as an efficient, focused storyteller who pares narrative to the bone. That style of filmmaking really allows (or requires) performance to come to the fore, and in the intense vigilante fantasy Rolling Thunder, both William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones deliver smart and scary interpretations of the soul-damaged protagonist and sidekick, respectively. Flynn certainly wasn't a self-conscious stylist, and he ended up toiling in the gulag of undistinguished action pictures like the 1989 Stallone-in-prison flick Lock Up and the Steven Seagal revenge thriller Out for Justice. He died in 2007, and Rolling Thunder is...Bill ChambersSwimming to Cambodia (1987) - DVDtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c0191041de56b970c2013-07-07T19:37:48-05:002013-07-07T19:10:04-05:00****/**** Image C Sound C Extras B directed by Jonathan Demme by Walter Chaw I learned about memoir as art watching Spalding Gray in Jonathan Demme's Swimming to Cambodia. Although I was a freshman in college when I first saw it, I'm not sure that I ever really knew what "memoir" was before, and, since, I've been hard pressed to find any examples that measure up to the bar it sets. Swimming to Cambodia also provides an impossible standard for direction, as Demme takes Gray's "monolog" format (essentially him, alone, on a stage) and turns it into something like an expressionistic piece, something that is at once inside Gray's mind and inside yours using thoughtful editing choices and clever sound and lighting design. In a year that saw the release of Predator, Full Metal Jacket, The Untouchables, Empire of the Sun, Raising Arizona, Near Dark, A Better Tomorrow II, Angel Heart, Evil Dead II, and RoboCop, it's a little astonishing to realize the best-directed film is this one with a guy sitting at a table. For what it's worth, as I was writing my own memoir of a very particular moment in my life, the only readership I really imagined...Bill ChambersThe Producers (1968) [Deluxe Edition] - DVD|[Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray and DVD Combo Packtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01901e0c8ca4970b2013-06-30T23:15:00-05:002013-06-30T21:21:25-05:00Mel Brooks' The Producers *½/**** DVD - Image A- Sound B- Extras B+ BD - Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+ starring Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, Dick Shawn, Kenneth Mars written and directed by Mel Brooks click any image to enlarge by Walter Chaw A seminal year for film, 1968: Once Upon a Time in the West, Rosemary's Baby, Planet of the Apes, Night of the Living Dead, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Barbarella, If..., Targets, Faces, Danger: Diabolik...and, some would say, Mel Brooks's The Producers, a film back in the limelight thanks to the record-breaking, award-winning Broadway play on which it's based now coming out as an extraordinarily ill-advised feature film of its own. Unlike Brooks's other classics (Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, even High Anxiety), The Producers has aged pretty poorly. It's played broad, which is to say that everyone acts like they're being defibrillated every five minutes, leading to a lot of high-decibel screeching and running around in circles. And I don't really understand what the film is about: Is it an attack on the theatre, or is it an attack on Nazis? If it's neither, if it's instead some kind of vaudevillian farce about the last days of...Bill ChambersWoochi: The Demon Slayer (2009) - Blu-ray Disctag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01901c9b524e970b2013-05-26T19:37:26-05:002013-05-26T19:37:26-05:00Woochi **/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B- starring Kang Dong-won, Kim Yoon-seok, Im Soo-jung, Yoo Hae-jin written and directed by Choi Dong-hoon click any image to enlarge by Bryant Frazer With directors like Park Chan-wook, Kim Ki-duk, and Bong Joon-ho doing their level best to reinvent genres like the revenge thriller, the lurid melodrama, and even the monster movie, recent Korean cinema has been a wellspring of intrigue for movie buffs. You won't get that kind of ambition from Woochi, a middle-of-the-road adventure yarn constructed out of bits of Korean mythology, formulaic action beats, and Hollywood-style VFX work. It's featherweight through and through, adventurous only inasmuch as it switches gears partway in, moving from the generic conventions of a period martial-arts film to those of an urban fantasy opus set in modern South Korea, where centuries-old wizards are vying to retrieve an ancient relic. If you listen carefully enough during the quiet bits, you can almost hear the popcorn being chewed. RUNNING TIME 135 minutes MPAA Not Rated ASPECT RATIO(S) 2.35:1 (1080p/MPEG-4) LANGUAGES Korean 5.1 DTS-HD MA Korean 2.0 DTS-HD MA (Stereo) English 5.1 DTS-HD MA English 2.0 DTS-HD MA (Stereo) SUBTITLES English REGION A DISC TYPE BD-50 STUDIO...Bill Chambers